Category Archives: Public Engagement and Policy Making

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Each year, the Hansard Society conducts an Audit of Political Engagement, which seeks to measure how the public views and engages with the political process. The latest Audit demonstrates that public dissatisfaction with our political systems and actors is worryingly high and increasingly intense. However, as Lawrence McKay explains, disaffection has not yet translated into disengagement.

The Hansard Society’s Audit of Political Engagement,now in its sixteenth year, is an annual study, giving a benchmark to measure public opinion about politics and the political system, as well as how engaged people are in the process. The Society describes it as an ‘annual health check’ – and this time round, the patient is in a bad way. Commentators love to declare a crisis, and the Societyhas often cautioned against such framing. More often than not, there is more continuity than change. Yet this year’s findings can hardly be described any other way.

Opinions of the system of governing are at their lowest point in the 15-year Audit series – worse now than in the aftermath of the MPs’ expenses scandal. People are pessimistic about the country’s problems, and large segments of the public seem willing to entertain radical changes which would alter or even undermine our democracy. While they are no less engaged in the democratic process, many people increasingly want to keep their distance and not to take part in decision-making.

Discontent: more widespread and more intense

The striking thing about this year’s Audit is that not only are more people unhappy, but the intensity of their discontent is unprecedented. Our ‘core indicators’ are the best evidence that something is amiss – in particular, our question on ‘the present system of governing Britain’, and how much it could be improved. We find that discontent is at its historical peak, with more than seven-in-ten feeling it needs either ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a great deal’ of improvement. Furthermore, people are moving into the most negative category. The proportion who stated that it needs ‘a great deal’ of improvement, at 37%, has roughly doubled since the first Audit in 2004. This increased discontent is broad-based, occurring across all social classes, age groups and levels of education. If there is a common thread to where it occurs, it is among non-voters where discontent has risen most. It may be that people who are already disengaged are finding more reasons to hate politics, but many voters are, too.

Yet, while the wider system is held in contempt, it is mostly political actors that bear the brunt of this. We asked our respondents to give their level of confidence in different groups ‘to act in the best interests of the public’. Groups like civil servants and judges generally garnered positive ratings, but the government, MPs, Lords and political parties were judged more negatively, with around two-in-three expressing low or no confidence. The exception – in line with results of previous studies – was local councils and the Scottish government who were seen somewhat more positively than UK-wide actors. Continue reading →

A week after the original date set for the UK to leave the European Union, there is still no firm plan for how to do so. The Prime Minister has sought a further extension of the Article 50 process, but it remains unclear how the different factions in the House of Commons can be brought together. Jim Gallagher argues that the citizens’ assembly process might offer a way around the current impasse.

With parliament unable to agree away forward on Brexit, the only option other than ‘no deal’ is a long delay for the UK to rethink its approach. Europe is still open to this, but says it needs a ‘strong justification’.

Citizens’ Assemblies offer a new way to resolve the issue and help unite the country during that period.

A no plan Brexit and broken public trust

The Tory party’s search for a quick, simple fix, largely driven by its internal needs, has defined the Europe debate so far. Contrast this with Harold Macmillan’s decision to apply for membership in 1961, based on a deep and comprehensive analysis, or Labour’s 23 volumes on whether to join the euro. Little wonder Westminster and Whitehall failed to secure a workable agreement, and that few members of the public find it possible to support the options now on the table.

This present deadlock is reason enough to bring the public back into the debate. But, more importantly, we have not just a government unable to lead but a public unwilling to be led. 68% of people now feel none of the main political parties speaks for them. ‘Betrayal’ and ‘treason’ are the everyday language of debate. Remain supporters say the referendum was won by lies and stolen data; Leave supporters feel robbed of a clean break with Europe.

A last minute compromise deal, with far-reaching economic and social consequences, conjured up behind closed doors in Westminster, will not get public acceptance from either Remainers or Leavers. People already deeply distrust the Brexit political process. Continue reading →

The latest issue of Monitor, the Constitution Unit’s regular newsletter, was published today. When the previous issue came out in November, the lack of a withdrawal agreement was a cause of great uncertainty. Four months later, a deal has been reached with the EU, but it has failed to gain parliamentary support and what will happen on 29 March remains an open question. As our editorial team says below, the current crisis is testing our constitution on multiple fronts and the strain is starting to show. This post is the opening article from Monitor 71; you can download the full issue (as well as past editions) here.

This Monitor appears less than three weeks before the date set for the UK to leave the European Union. Remarkably, the form that Brexit will take – indeed, whether it will happen at all – remains highly uncertain. The coming days and weeks will be crucial in determining the UK’s future direction. Brexit has placed the UK’s political and constitutional system under great strain. That is partly because it is so contested – dividing the main parties internally and risking alienation between the popular majority who backed Leave in 2016 and the parliamentary majority who opposed it. The 2017 general election added to these challenges by resulting in a minority government. Meanwhile, the political task is immensely complex and the stakes exceptionally high.

This strain has manifested itself in numerous ways. The Independent Group (TIG), created on 18 February (see page 12) and currently including 11 former Labour and Conservative MPs, is the largest breakaway from the main parties since the ‘Gang of Four’ founded the Council for Social Democracy – precursor to the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – in 1981. Labour disquiet is widespread, and Deputy Leader Tom Watson has proposed an intra-party grouping of social democrats to stem further defections. The Conservatives have their own party-within-a-party, in the strongly pro-Brexit European Research Group. After many false starts, it forced a vote of no confidence in Theresa May’s leadership of the party in December, which she won by 200 votes to 117. Continue reading →

The Constitution Unit has today published a major new report, Doing Democracy Better: How Can Information and Discourse in Election and Referendum Campaigns in the UK Be Improved? Drawing on detailed cross-national research, it proposes a bold set of reforms designed to transform the quality of democratic practice in the UK. In this post, the report’s authors, Alan Renwick and Michela Palese, summarise their analysis and explain their proposals. They argue that a new, publicly funded ‘information hub’ should be developed that gathers multiple information types from diverse sources, all guided by deep citizen deliberation.

The laws governing our elections and referendums are no longer ‘fit for purpose’. That is the stark conclusion of a recent report by the House of Commons Digital Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which calls for far-reaching changes to the regulation of online political communications. This is the latest in a series of reports (see also a recent collection of essays from the Electoral Reform Society) highlighting the threat to our existing democratic practices posed by the digital revolution and proposing measures to address this.

These contributions are important and deserve careful attention. Yet in our own report, generously funded by the McDougall Trust and published today, we aim to go further. We argue that we should strive to strengthen our democratic practice around elections and referendums, not merely protect the status quo from new challenges. Dissatisfaction with the quality of our democratic discourse is not limited to digital communications. Disinformation is propagated not just online, but also through traditional media. Voters and politicians alike are frustrated that reasonable discussions about politics and policies often seem impossible.

We argue that we could do much better. Our report analyses nine distinct strategies for strengthening political information. Through detailed case studies of practice around the world, we examine what does and does not work. We then propose an integrated model that would place the UK at the forefront of democratic renewal, enabling lively, diverse, citizen-led discussion to take place during election and referendum campaigns. Continue reading →

As the debate about the UK’s relationship with the EU continues to dominate the political agenda, citizens’ assemblies have been mooted by several high profile figures as a possible way to break the Brexit impasse. Here Sarah Allan and Rebecca McKee explain how and why citizens’ assemblies are able to assist and improve the policy-making process through engaging and informing ordinary members of the public.

Citizens’ assemblies have been gathering more attention amongst politicians, the public, and the media in recent weeks. For some this model of public engagement is entirely new. Yet, the history of citizens’ assemblies and methods like them extends back to the 1970s. Since then they have been used around the world to bring together representative groups of the public to deliberate on controversial and complex issues. Countries that have had citizens’ assemblies include Canada, the United States, Australia and Belgium. Most famously Ireland’s citizens’ assembly and constitutional convention played key roles in change on abortion and gay marriage.

The core purpose of a citizens’ assembly is to give decision-makers access to the informed and considered views of the public. A citizens’ assembly can be said to have worked when these three factors are delivered to a high standard. We use the examples of the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit (CAB) and the Citizens’ Assembly on Social Care (CASC) to show that it is possible to deliver on these principles.

‘The views of those that took part in our citizens’ assembly have been vital in informing our thinking and the model also provides a possible route for further public engagement and building the support that any reforms will need.’ Clive Betts MP, Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee.

The public

Is it possible to recruit a representative group of participants?

The primary goal of citizens’ assembly recruitment is to secure a broadly representative sample of the population as assembly members. The population of interest varies depending on the assembly topic. CASC was commissioned to look at the devolved issue of social care, so participants were only recruited from England. CAB dealt with the UK’s exit from the EU, so its membership was UK-wide. Both topics were issues of policy so participants were restricted to those eligible to vote in either general elections for CASC, or the 2016 European Referendum for CAB. Continue reading →

Over 40,000 e-petitions have been submitted to parliament since the current system was introduced in 2015. Cristina Leston Bandeira and Viktoria Spaiser have conducted research into how the public views the consequent parliamentary discussion of issues raised in these petitions by analysing comments made by those watching the live parliamentary coverage. Their findings lead them to conclude that parliamentary debates should be adapted to be more inclusive of the original petitions’ aims.

Parliament introduced an e-petitions system in 2015 with the aim of enhancing its relationship with the public. The system has seen extraordinary levels of usage, with over 40,000 e-petitions submitted and plenty of other evidence of very considerable engagement from the public, such as petitions debates regularly being the most read debates on Hansard. The extraordinary usage is only one element of this new system, however. At the Centre for Democratic Engagement, we have been investigating it, focusing in particular on the more subtle expressions of engagement, beyond usage numbers. We have interviewed petitioners, developed participant observation, and analysed petitions data, parliamentary documentation and social media activity associated with e-petitions.

Some of this research has now started to come out, namely our latest article in Policy & Internet, where we use natural language processing, machine learning and social network analysis of Twitter data to explore what it shows about the extent of people’s engagement, the contents of Twitter e-petition conversations, who is taking part and how they interact. In this blog post we focus on how the public react to the format of the e-petitions parliamentary debates, through their comments on Twitter whilst they watch these debates. Our findings provide interesting insights into how people perceive the e-petition procedures in terms of fairness and responsiveness, suggesting that petition parliamentary debates could be more inclusive of the original petitions’ aims. Continue reading →

With just two months until exit day, it remains unclear what form Brexit will take. Could citizens’ assemblies provide some of the answers to the questions politicians have yet to resolve? Alan Renwick outlines the scenarios in which a citizens’ assembly could take place, and what it would need to be a success.

The idea that a citizens’ assembly could help resolve the Brexit impasse is picking up wide support. A diverse group of notable figures proposed it just before Christmas. MPs including Labour’s Stella Creasy and Lisa Nandy and the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas have backed it. So too has the Guardiannewspaper. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has put forward a plan for citizens’ assemblies as part of ‘a process of nationwide consultation and reflection’, which was endorsed in a post on this blog last week.

That citizens’ assemblies are gaining support as a way of reinvigorating our democracy is enormously welcome. A citizens’ assembly is a group of around 50–200 people who are randomly selected from the general public to reflect the make-up of the population as a whole. They meet over several weekends to learn about and deliberate on a policy question before reaching recommendations. As an excellent piece by Leo Benedictus in last week’s Guardian illustrates, such assemblies enable serious, informed reflection on important policy matters by members of the public. They foster conversations among people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives who normally wouldn’t even meet each other. If they are integrated effectively into the wider policy-making process, they can transform the quality of public debate and decision-making.

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The Constitution Unit in the Department of Political Science at University College London is the UK’s leading research body on constitutional change.

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